• Bitcoin used for money laundering; blocked by Swedish bank

Creandum, a Nordic venture capital firm says it has built the world’s largest database of businesses dealing in Bitcoins in an effort to shed light on a virtual currency which has seen its value rocket in the past year, Reuters reports.

The database contained more than 300 companies trading Bitcoins, ranging from exchanges to payment processors and gambling companies, according to the company.intention is to give entrepreneurs and investors an overview of companies with a significant role in the Bitcoin system, the newswire said.

“This year and next year the Bitcoin needs to prove itself as a payment mechanism, and it could go either way,” Creandum associate Joel Eriksson Enquist told Reuters.

“Our hope is that the database will work like Wikipedia, with more and more contributors and more comprehensive data,” he said.

The open-source site which can be found at http://bitcoin.knackhq.com/btcdb .

BitCoin has also captured the attention of regulators, who are struggling to keep up as people use the software. “Currencies are traditionally tied to a central bank or a geographic area,” Olof Wallin, an official at the Swedish Tax Agency who’s drafting rules for Bitcoin and the programmers who generate it, recently told Bloomberg. “[We will] view Bitcoins as what we call another asset — just like art or antiques.”